Inspired by this tweet a month or two back to give the subject a bit of thought, I present to you now my collected Books Of The Year list wherein I nominate three from each of the years of this blog's existence (well, I only did one from 2006 as there were only a handful). Three seemed the right number to make the decision-making tricky from an average yearly sample of twenty or so. No particular rules except I tried to avoid picking two by the same author (not generally a problem) and tried not to agonise about it too much or spend too much time on it.don't want to trample on the Book Of The Year blog idea this has just given me, but of the ones featured on the blog it'd be either The City & The City or The Road Home #books https://t.co/MGpfcM78hy
— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) December 27, 2022
The table below presents the list; I've spiced it up a little by including a piece of text (strictly unedited) from the original review which will hopefully either give a flavour of the book, ruin a key aspect of the plot, or just amuse. I may make this A Thing in future as part of the annual book round-up I try to do in January.
| Year | Author | Title | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2006 | Anita Shreve | The Weight Of Water | two parallel intertwined stories kind of story |
| 2007 | William Boyd | Restless | inevitable betrayals and double-crossings |
| TC Boyle | Riven Rock | traumatic formative sexual experiences | |
| Joyce Carol Oates | The Falls | small fly in the ointment of her marital bliss | |
| 2008 | Robertson Davies | The Cunning Man | all manner of throwaway literary and cultural anecdotes |
| F Scott Fitzgerald | The Great Gatsby | driving off gaily in your Hispano-Suiza, getting your scarf caught in the wire wheels and strangling yourself | |
| Anne Tyler | A Patchwork Planet | all you've got left to hold the reader's attention is your actual skill at writing believable characters | |
| 2009 | Iain M Banks | Inversions | knife missile which she uses to escape, with impressively bloody results |
| Cormac McCarthy | The Road | what will you do when you meet people who will do those things, and more | |
| Isabel Colegate | The Shooting Party | ruthlessly enforced social structures and strictures preventing you from ever saying what you really think | |
| 2010 | Peter Ackroyd | Chatterton | only employed as a model because he was working up to running off with his wife |
| Joyce Carol Oates | We Were The Mulvaneys | periodically fleeing to the next one when anyone starts to rely on her too much or show her any personal affection | |
| Stieg Larsson | The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo | the obligatory secret subterranean porn dungeon for the hero to be rescued from in the nick of time as he is about to be buggered to death | |
| 2011 | Kazuo Ishiguro | Never Let Me Go | hopefully we might carry on a bit longer, and avoid the organ-harvesting death squads |
| Tim Winton | Cloudstreet | much roistering and raging and rollicking, not to mention rucking and rogering | |
| Patricia Highsmith | The Talented Mr Ripley | various psychological issues, like, you know, murdering people | |
| 2012 | Iain M Banks | Look To Windward | but in fact on a deadly mission so secret EVEN HE DOESN'T KNOW WHAT IT IS!!! |
| William Boyd | Ordinary Thunderstorms | a man hiding in a hedge isn't really going to drive the narrative along, so we need more plot | |
| Arkady & Boris Strugatsky | Roadside Picnic | the constant danger of getting arrested or shot or stumbling into a gravitational anomaly and getting turned inside-out | |
| 2013 | TC Boyle | Drop City | a guy who can render his own bear-fat, make moose sausages and knock together a dog-sled with just a few bits of discarded porcupine guts and some whittling |
| Alison Lurie | Foreign Affairs | what sympathetic people might call "flighty", "free-spirited", "eccentric", etc., but the rest of us would just call "mental" | |
| Ian McEwan | The Innocent | Progress down the tunnel towards the Russian sector continues, as does Leonard's progress down Maria's "tunnel", hem hem | |
| 2014 | GB Edwards | The Book Of Ebenezer Le Page | all of whom disappoint him in some way with their laziness, stupidity, and embrace of modern ideas like the motor car, feminism or the television set |
| Russell Hoban | Riddley Walker | any notion of standard rules for spelling and grammar have gone out of the window, not that anyone has windows any more | |
| Walter Tevis | The Queen's Gambit | eating properly, heading down the gym and, most importantly, cutting out the pints of white wine for breakfast | |
| 2015 | Sebastian Faulks | Birdsong | getting better acquainted with Mrs. Azaire by going down on her comme une tonne de briques while René is out of the house |
| Richard Yates | Revolutionary Road | otherwise intelligent young people waking up one morning in their sterile little suburban box and realising that they don't know each other at all | |
| Christopher Priest | Inverted World | necessitate a rethink of the policy of keeping the plebs ignorant of the outside world | |
| 2016 | Marilynne Robinson | Home | before either his father dies or Jack's desire to disappear and be away from responsibility and scrutiny gets the better of him |
| Daniel Woodrell | Winter's Bone | everyone has too many guns, drinks too much hooch and is cooking up crank | |
| EL Doctorow | Ragtime | falls out of a wardrobe while having a furtive wank | |
| 2017 | Robertson Davies | The Rebel Angels | the circumstances in which he subsequently murdered McVarish during the course of an elaborate sex game |
| Yann Queffelec | The Savage Wedding | the persuasive suggestion that with Ludo gone things might get a bit spicier in the boudoir department | |
| Kurt Vonnegut | Cat's Cradle | causes the sea, as well as all rivers, streams and groundwater on the planet, to solidify into ice-nine, instantly ending almost all life | |
| 2018 | Russell Banks | The Sweet Hereafter | attach an actual face to the child in the back of the bus disappearing off a ravine into the cold murky water |
| LP Hartley | The Go-Between | they interrupt Ted giving Marian a practical farming tutorial, in particular a demonstration of some vigorous ploughing | |
| Tom Wolfe | A Man In Full | a bit of a problematic Mary Sue in an otherwise unmitigated sea of arseholes | |
| 2019 | Kazuo Ishiguro | The Remains Of The Day | Miss Kenton is wearing a sign that says AVAILABLE, or possibly RIDE ME LIKE ONE OF LORD DARLINGTON'S PRIZE MARES |
| Marilynne Robinson | Gilead | what's a respectable Reverend doing having a son in his late sixties, the randy old goat? | |
| Iain Banks | Transition | one person's disastrous turn of events about which Something Must Be Done is someone else's wholly necessary and exciting developments | |
| 2020 | Jim Crace | Harvest | ill-equipped to adapt to quickly-changing circumstances, and WAIT A MINUTE here are some circumstances quickly changing |
| Mark Z Danielewski | House Of Leaves | the fact that a corridor has just poofed into appearance out of freakin' nowhere | |
| Alasdair Gray | Lanark | only if you're some sort of hopelessly gauche naïve ingénue who expects fictional narratives to follow a linear pattern, hahahaha | |
| 2021 | John Christopher | The Death Of Grass | so a few people's lawns die, you might say, no biggie |
| Hilary Mantel | Bring Up The Bodies | actual public bloody dismemberment rather than discreet shuffling off to a nunnery | |
| Arturo Perez-Reverte | The Flanders Panel | the pristine "original" work? What does that even mean? What do words, in general, even mean? | |
| 2022 | China Miéville | The City & The City | a city (takes drag on cigarette) .... OF THE MIND. Though, erm, also totally real (coughs) |
| Jim Harrison | The Road Home | a fierce and independent girl not prepared to take any shit from anybody, including her grandfather | |
| Tim Winton | Breath | all good things must come to an end, even bracingly transgressive and dangerous under-age sex |
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